In 1999 Bobby de Guzman, an IT manager from Scarborough, Ontario, took the
decision that would finally tear his family apart.

His son Jonathan, then aged 12, had been offered a two-week trial at Feyenoord, with the promise of a youth contract waiting at the end of it.

Ever since he had emigrated to Canada from the Philippines as a child, Bobby had been fanatical about football. The idea of his two sons making a living in the game obsessed him. Julian, the older of the two, had already flown the nest, making his way through the ranks at Marseille.

Jonathan, however, was the real talent. Having started playing what he calls “ice soccer” on the frozen streets of their Toronto suburb, he was regularly coming up against boys two or three years older than him. But even though he was practising with local teams most nights of the week, there was only so much that Canadian football could offer him.

When the chance arose to go to Holland, Bobby was determined to seize it. He spent the family’s life savings on plane tickets to Rotterdam.

“My dad really pushed us,” Jonathan remembers. “If he hadn’t pushed us to make the most of our talent, I don’t think I would have got this far. Of course, it was a very big step for myself, but also for my mother. She wasn’t all for it, because I’m her youngest child.”

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In an age where the boundaries of nationality are becoming increasingly blurry, or even irrelevant, De Guzman embodies a very modern sort of footballer: blown by the winds of globalisation, swept by the whims of the market, footloose in more senses than one.

Every sporting career is the culmination of a journey, but at the age of just 25, the attacking midfielder’s journey has been circuitous by any standard: born in Canada to a Filipino father and a Jamaican mother; across the Atlantic Ocean to Holland; a quick tour of the Balearic seaboard; before finally washing up on the Gower peninsula, in a smartly-groomed function room on the first floor of Swansea City’s Liberty Stadium, where we are talking now.

Now, the diminutive, nimble-footed De Guzman is one of the stars of Michael Laudrup’s Swansea squad, having signed from Villarreal in the summer and scored four goals this season. He has two children of his own, and hopes of an international call-up. But he remains the product of those disorienting early years.

“Yeah, it was scary,” he says of moving to Europe at such a young age. “But when everything got settled down, it went by very fast. My dad told me I was going to sit by the window and cry, and I would want to come home. But I can’t remember a day that I was sitting by the window. I always enjoyed myself.”

Not that it was always easy. In a room full of local kids, De Guzman stood out a mile. “You had guys trying to pick at you,” he says. “There were foreigners, but nobody had come as far as me. I had to learn Dutch for the first two years before I could go to a normal school. I learned it pretty quick.”

He made his debut for the first team aged just 18, dominating the great Philip Cocu in a home game against PSV Eindhoven. Dutch legend Willem van Hanegem compared him to a young Zinedine Zidane. But while De Guzman was growing as a player on the pitch, he was growing as a person off it. His parents eventually separated, unable to fill the void that their absent sons had left.

“I became more mature at a young age,” he says. “Knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. I held myself. My brother was in Germany at the time, and at weekends I would travel over by train. We would speak on MSN Messenger – I remember we had dial-up internet, and it would take forever.”

At some point – and De Guzman is unable to pinpoint exactly when this happened – he began to feel Dutch. The country had reared and educated him. And so, four years ago, he declared his intention to play for Holland. The reaction back in Canada was hostile. With Owen Hargreaves having slipped through the net a decade ago, and Junior Hoilett poised to follow, this defection seemed like another betrayal. One newspaper described De Guzman as a “traitor”.

“Canada’s not a soccer country,” De Guzman says by way of explanation. “I’m not saying they don’t produce good players, but for us to produce good players, they have to go overseas. Of course you’ll get criticism, because players like Owen Hargreaves and me, we could have started making a pathway for other players. And they’re still putting pressure on me to make that decision, because I haven’t been capped yet as a Dutch player. I’m still hoping for that call-up.”

Along with Wilfried Zaha and Raheem Sterling, two players in a similar position, De Guzman represents the new face of football – neither one thing nor the other, but forced to choose nonetheless. His two children still live in Holland, and he returns there whenever he has a weekend off. Yet his accent and his Toronto Blue Jays cap give him away as Canadian too.

“I feel Dutch and Canadian at the same time,” he insists. “I’m half-Jamaican, half-Filipino. Born in Canada, moved to Holland. Got a Dutch passport."